


Earthquake Weather

by meyeri



Category: Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)
Genre: F/F, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-11 23:02:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28625388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meyeri/pseuds/meyeri
Summary: Maria feels like she’s drifting, like she’s floating in oily water trying to peer through the scrim of her revulsion to find Helena, to find the merit and humanity Val seems to see so clearly. They’ve run this scene three times already, and each time it ends with a little more viciousness left in the air between them.
Relationships: Maria Enders/Valentine
Kudos: 2





	Earthquake Weather

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a series of missing scenes and codas meant to be read as if they're woven into the film itself. I have occasionally used dialogue from the movie (and therefore from the play), mostly to hit the emotional beats.
> 
> Not sure if anyone is still reading in this fandom, but if you are, I hope you enjoy!

“I don’t know anymore. Maybe I only remember what suits me to remember.”

Across the dinner table, Val rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I think so. Because the story changes every time,” she says, cutting a look over to Maria. She stretches out like a cat, cigarette perilously close to ashing itself in her wine, smirk tucked away in the corner of her mouth. 

“Bitch,” Maria says, just because, but there’s no real heat behind it. It’s their first night alone in Sils Maria and Valentine has been needling her about Wilhelm all through dinner; they’re both deep into the wine, and Maria has lost track of what number cigarette Val is on. The one she’s smoking now is one of Maria’s all-white slims, the type Maria has smoked since she was seventeen and thought they made her look elegant and refined, the kind she’d smoked during the first run of _Maloja Snake_. Wilhelm had thought Sigrid would smoke regular cigarettes but Maria had insisted on these instead, her own brand, her own personal style.

Val usually smokes regular Camels, leaves packs and packs of them in her wake like a reptile shedding its skin, holds them absently like they’re extensions of her hand. Here and now Val looks different, with Maria’s slim held between her fingers: it makes her look a little younger, a little more unknown, a little more like she’s, for lack of a better term, _trying_. 

Maria looks away, back to her wine, the looming prospect of rehearsal stretching out before her. They’re starting tomorrow with the first scene of the first act and Maria is dreading it, dreading Helena, dreading Sigrid. Here, now, with that cigarette, Val looks like Sigrid. 

Maria dreads her, too.

Valentine says something, but Maria doesn’t hear.

“Maria?”

“Sorry, what?” 

Val looks at her sideways. “I said, do you want more wine? I can get another bottle.”

“No, thank you.” Maria stands up. “I think I’ll have a cognac. Too much wine gives me the spins.”

\------

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Helena. I’m Sigrid.”

Maria is off-book and Valentine is halfway there: she’s holding the text in her hand, thumb stuck in between the pages of the scene, but she delivers the lines rather than reads them. “Sigrid kisses Helena’s hand,” Val narrates the stage direction, raising an eyebrow at Maria as if to say, _Really?_ Maria will admit that Wilhelm’s dramatics do have a different edge now, here in the twenty-first century.

“I hope you enjoy your time at the company,” Maria says, ignoring Val’s unspoken commentary. The first scene is pure exposition, designed to show Helena at her most secure, before Sigrid makes her start to crumble. Maria reaches for that backbone, that self-confidence that comes naturally to her as Maria, and finds it easily; she settles into it, into the way Valentine is looking at her.

“I’m sure I will,” Val says. She sucks half of her top lip under her teeth, looks Maria up and down. _Leers,_ Maria is pretty sure the stage direction says.

“Tell me, Sigrid,” Maria says, and starts walking to the other side of the room, gesturing for Sigrid to follow. “Why did you want to come work for this company, specifically? I hear you had your pick of internships.”

Valentine laughs. “Do you want the truth, or the answer you want to hear?” Maria looks at her sharply: Val’s voice is rueful and casual, while Maria had always played it aloof and mysterious.

“The truth, please.” Maria comes to a stop and turns to face Valentine.

“It’s… you,” Valentine says, and reaches out to touch the back of Maria’s hand. That is also written into the stage directions, as Maria knows very well, but the touch startles her nevertheless.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I wanted to work for _you_ ,” Val repeats, and despite everything Maria _feels_ it, the barbed hook of the words catching at her skin. “You, specifically. A woman, running a company of this size…” Val trails off, looking out into the distance over Maria’s shoulder. “I admire your work, what you’ve done here.” She pauses and glances down at the text. “And I admire _you_ , as well. Your charm, your elegance. Your beauty.” 

She looks up and meets Maria’s eyes; the expression on her face is carefully controlled, and Maria can’t read it.

“You flatter me. Do you think it will get you something? Special treatment?”

Val shrugs. “Perhaps.”

“This work is difficult and often thankless. I hope you’re prepared.” 

“I am here to provide whatever you need. Helena.” Val tilts her head and flicks a look at Maria, and it’s—truly there’s no other word—coy. That’s Sigrid. And it’s ironic; that’s Val herself.

Val has run lines with her before, of course, but never anything like this. It’s just enough off the mark to be absurd; Valentine is no Sigrid, and Maria, much to her frustration, is still no Helena. But Maria would be blind to not see the parallels, and she knows Valentine sees them too, can tell from the wry twist to her mouth when she says some of the lines.

“Well, then I wish you the best,” Maria says. “Excuse me.”

“Maria exits, stage left; Sigrid watches her go and lights a cigarette. End of scene one.” Val exhales and pushes her glasses farther up her nose. “You dropped a line earlier, did you notice?”

No, Maria hadn’t. “Shit, really? Which one?”

“When Sigrid asks if she wants the truth or what she wants to hear, first you say, ‘I have enough people telling me what they think I want to hear,’ and _then_ you ask her for the truth.”

“Dammit,” Maria mutters.

“Do you want to run it again?”

No. “Yes,” Maria says. “Again.”

\------

When they travel together, Valentine usually wakes hours before Maria. Maria doesn’t know what Val _does_ in the early mornings, really, but she knows that there’s always a coffee and a paper waiting for her when she does rise, and that somehow the coffee is always hot, even if Val is outside in the hallway on the phone. The Val that Maria meets first thing in the morning is already two cigarettes and three cortados into her day, tapping away at her iPad: alert, efficient, practical, helpful. But after three days in Wilhelm’s chalet, the pattern is reversed. It’s Maria who wakes early with the dawn, Maria who makes her own coffee, Maria who feels the need to work, to move, to act, while Valentine is still in bed.

(To be fair, it’s not that Val is sleeping in, really. She’s always up by 8:30 or 9, regardless of how much they have to drink the night before. It’s more that Maria can’t stay asleep, can’t stay in bed after she wakes just as the sky is starting to lighten. She feels itchy with the presence of Helena trying to skitter under her skin, the idea of her always a pressing weight in the back of her mind, chasing Maria into her dreams when she tries to fall back asleep.)

So Maria moves quietly down the stairs in the pre-dawn light, putters around the kitchen as the moka pot spits and hisses and the smell of coffee blooms around her, as the cold and clammy morning air gradually warms and glows into another glorious Alpine summer day.

It happens one morning maybe three days after they start running the Act I lines of _Maloja Snake_ together. 

Maria is passing in front of Val’s room on her way to the kitchen. The house has thin walls.

It’s the half-swallowed moan she hears first, the sound that makes her feet pause. After a few beats, she hears a drawn-out sigh, and then another little noise, muffled, like it’s making its way around Val’s hand or arm, or a pillow.

Maria should leave, she knows; she should leave Valentine to her privacy. She’s French, after all: she has no qualms about humans and their sexualities and their pleasures, and she also knows not to intrude on them when she hasn’t been invited.

(Is Val on her back, knees bent with one hand between her legs and one hand covering her mouth? Or maybe she’s on her belly, right leg canted up, hips pushing down against her fingers into the soft of the mattress, face hidden in a pillow?)

“Fuck,” Maria hears next, just softly, just whispered. But the raw shred in Valentine’s voice sends something hot and twisted down into Maria’s gut.

The shock of it, of the heat and the ache blooming low in her stomach, is enough to propel Maria away from the door and into the kitchen. It’s enough to make her start washing last night’s dinner dishes, which she had childishly been hoping Valentine would volunteer to do at some point today. But now Maria finds herself running the water and clattering the plates, soaping them up loudly and too aggressively in the sink. 

Twenty minutes later Val emerges, heading to the bathroom. Maria hears her washing her hands and brushing her teeth, and puts the moka pot on for her. She taps anxiously at the countertop for ten seconds before she lights a cigarette, even though she tries not to smoke too much in the mornings. 

When Val comes into the kitchen, Maria doesn’t let herself think about the fact that Val is probably still soft and open under her jeans, maybe even a little sensitive, doesn’t let herself notice the haze in Val’s eyes that’s only partially residual sleep.

“Coffee?” Maria offers instead, pouring it into one of Rosa’s cups.

“Thanks,” Val says, voice still rough with the morning and too many cigarettes. As she takes the cup her fingers brush Maria’s against the warm china, just quickly, just casually. But Maria feels the graze like a scratch, like a nicotine stain tattooing itself on her fingers, burning and stinging.

\------

“It’s not just your youth, or your powers of seduction. No—it’s your aplomb, your unshakeable self-confidence.”

Val pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose with her knuckle, and it’s unsettling because it’s such a _Valentine_ gesture. Sigrid doesn’t wear glasses, and the dissonance is disturbing. 

“You don’t know me.”

And it’s true. Maria has been disoriented for the whole scene, and Val’s line delivery—of lines Maria knows so well she might as well have them inked onto the backs of her eyelids—is making Maria trip over herself. Val as Sigrid is mellowed and assured, where Maria’s Sigrid was high-strung and cocky; Val is impulsive and present, where Maria was rehearsed and studied, for all that Klaus keeps telling her that her performance was “modern.” Now Maria feels like she’s drifting, like she’s floating in oily water trying to peer through the scrim of her revulsion to find Helena, to find the merit and humanity Val seems to see so clearly. They’ve run this scene three times already, and each time it ends with a little more viciousness left in the air between them. Maria hates Helena, and for the first time she hates Sigrid too, hates what Sigrid is making Helena feel here, what Sigrid is pushing Helena towards.

The click of a lighter pulls Maria back, and suddenly it’s just her and Valentine again.

“I think we need a break, maybe,” Val says mildly, around her cigarette. Maria knows she’s right; it’s the third or fourth time she’s flubbed this scene, and it’s only just now coming on noon.

After a moment Val offers the cigarette to Maria, two fingers out. Maria, against her better judgement, takes it. 

\------

A day later, after they’ve finally made it through Act I, Valentine tosses the contents of both their hampers together into the washing machine to run a load of laundry, but by the time the cycle is finished she’s napping, curled up in the lounge chair like a cat. She seems younger like this, Maria thinks, warmed in afternoon sunlight with her glasses off and face soft. Her tattoos look like the scribbles and doodles of a teenager who was bored in class: thin black line drawings inked haphazardly on the sides of her hands and wrists, as unintelligible as hieroglyphics except to the person who drew them.

Maria has never asked Val about her tattoos, has never paused or taken the space to wonder. She recognizes the _Guernica_ one, of course, the harsh black box stamped just below the bend in Val’s right elbow; she’d been with Val in the Reina Sofía in Madrid on a press tour when Val had first seen the painting, had stood shoulder to shoulder there with her while Val took it in for long minutes on end, fists clenched and eyes roving. But Maria doesn’t recognize the rest of Val’s tattoos, can’t fathom what meaning they have to Val.

Maria unloads the washing machine and takes the hamper out to hang on the line, because it’s better than sitting in silence with her thoughts and better than staring at Valentine waiting for her to wake up.

Unlike her tattoos, Val’s tee-shirt collection is one Maria knows well. Val dresses up when she needs to, but when she doesn’t she lives in these, and with the soft washed cotton in between her fingers, Maria understands why. She hangs Val’s shirts on the line from the bottom hem down, the way her mother used to on the tangle of lines stretched above the courtyard of their Paris flat. Here in the Swiss countryside, the arrangement on Rosa’s drying racks and clotheslines looks almost comical: Maria’s jeans and practical underwear and flannels and cardigans hanging next to Valentine’s confusing assortment of tee-shirts and tiny black thongs and giant white cotton briefs, her endless parade of black jeans and woolen socks.

Maria doesn’t do her own laundry very often (ever), and she wonders if it always looks like this: strangely intimate and exposed, Val’s bra tangling its strap with one of Maria’s shirtsleeves, their outer and inner clothes jumbled together and displayed in the sunshine of Sils Maria for all the world to see.

\------

“Helena, stop lying to yourself.” They’re outside again, running the closing scene of Act I in the late afternoon light. Maria had thought the outdoors would make her feel less claustrophobic, less hemmed in by Sigrid, but in fact it makes it worse. Valentine is circling her, as the stage direction instructs, and Maria feels completely immobilized, like she can’t move a muscle, can’t escape despite the great expanse around her.

“I’m not lying to anyone.”

“You are. I’m not a child,” Valentine says. She stops directly in front of Maria. “There’s nothing stopping us.” She steps forward, again as the stage direction indicates, so close that Maria can feel Val’s breath against her cheek. “I know you want me, that I slip into your dreams when you’re on the cusp of sleeping and waking, when your defenses are down.” Maria stares at Valentine; Val’s lips are parted, and they’re close enough that Maria can see the pink slide of her tongue against her lower lip, just briefly. Her eyes are unreadable behind her glasses, like she’s neither Valentine nor Sigrid, but someone else entirely. Someone Maria doesn’t recognize.

“My defenses are down now.”

“I know. That’s why I came.”

“Because I’m weak? Or to comfort me?”

Valentine reaches out, almost like she wants to touch Maria’s face, but then drops her hand. “What do you think?”

“Why do you want me?” Maria breathes out, answering a question with a question with a question. She feels caught, pinned by Valentine and by Wilhelm’s text and its words; they’re almost there, almost at the end of the scene and the end of the act, but rather than relief, she feels only anxiety and dread.

“Because you keep denying me.” Valentine bites her lip and looks down. Sigrid would never.

“So it’s the chase. And once I give in, will you lose interest? Will I become just another conquest?”

Val looks up again, sudden and sharp. “No. It’s different, with you.” 

When Maria had played Sigrid she had played this part earnestly, believing that at this point in the play, Sigrid really did think that it would be different with Helena. But from Valentine the line feels portentous, mysterious, like an omen from the gods—and not one Maria can read. 

Maria waits, because Wilhelm had always been adamant about letting silence do some of the work of the play. He had wanted the audience to sit with Helena’s discomfort, her inner turmoil, the worst of her devils and the audience’s own. Valentine bites her lip again and holds Maria’s gaze, simultaneously Sigrid and not-Sigrid, an unknowable other.

“Kiss me,” Maria says, finally. On paper it looks like a command, but it comes out of her mouth broken and wanting, a plea from a woman who’s been defeated but is still clinging to her control. But it doesn’t matter: a plea, a request, a demand—from Helena to Sigrid, they’re all the same.

Valentine holds her stare for a heartbeat—two, three—before she flicks her eyes, just briefly, down to Maria’s mouth. For a hysterical moment Maria thinks she might, here in the broad daylight of the Alps with no-one but God and the goats as their witnesses.

But Valentine steps back, exhales, rubs the back of her neck. “They kiss; curtain falls. End of Act I.” She bumps her glasses up her nose and looks at Maria, and just like that, Sigrid is gone.

\------

“You got an email from the lawyers this morning,” Valentine says. She’s slicing cheese and tomatoes for their sandwiches, and her back is to Maria. “They’re rescheduling to two months from now. The timing should work out fine with the rehearsal schedule.”

“Well, at least they’re accomplishing something, for what I’m paying them,” Maria mutters.

Valentine snorts. “Do you want mustard?”

“No,” Maria says. She sighs and rubs her temples, the dull thud of a headache already threatening to form behind her eyes just from the _reminder_ of lawyers and divorce papers and settlements. “Don’t ever get married.”

Val hums. “I think you might be a little biased, at this particular point in time.” She starts wrapping the sandwiches in cling film, fingers fast and efficient.

“Perhaps,” Maria concedes.

“Why _did_ you get married?” Val asks, after a minute of silence. She’s loading the sandwiches and apples into the backpack now, thinking ahead as always; Maria suddenly feels like she should be helping, but it’s too late. Val, as ever, has taken care of it.

“Why does anyone get married? I was young and in love,” Maria says, widening her eyes for dramatic flair, making the statement sound momentous and sweeping. Val giggles. “I thought that was it! I thought, you know, that was enough.”

“People get married for other reasons,” Val says mildly. “Love, sure. Naivety, definitely. But what about stability, security?” She gives Maria a sideways glance. “Family?”

“Pshh,” Maria says. “You can have all those things without a marriage.”

“I mean, yeah,” Val says. She hands Maria a bottle of water and moves around her, into the foyer. “And yet millions of people persist in getting married every year.”

“Naivety.” Maria repeats Val’s word back at her, and shoulders the backpack Val hands her. “Oh come now,” she says, when Valentine doesn’t reply. “Don’t tell me _you_ want to get married.”

Val shrugs but doesn’t look up from where she’s lacing her boots. “It will shock you to hear it’s never come up,” she says, dry. Maria can’t see her face, can’t interpret her tone. Maybe that’s why she pushes.

“But would you? If it did?”

“I don’t know.”

“Surely you must have thought about it. Did you dream of it, as a little girl? White dress and flowers and the whole dramatic performance of it?” Maria means it as a tease, but it comes out sounding crueler than she intends.

Val finally stands. “No. I mean, I don’t know, okay?” She makes an aborted half-shrug at Maria. “What do you want me to say? To completely write off the possibility of something I’ve never been able to truly consider in the first place?” She shakes her head. “Fine. I guess I see the appeal of having something… certain. Something known, knowable. Something defined, instead of…” Val makes a partial, jittery gesture with her hands. “Instead of something I’m constantly questioning, something that’s always shifting and nebulous.” She looks down as she says it.

Maria can’t help herself. “And you think a marriage will give that to you?”

“I mean, not always, obviously,” and there’s a bite to her words. Val opens her mouth to continue, but reconsiders. After a moment, she simply says, “But nothing’s perfect. And there’s not a better alternative.”

She’s so young; Maria envies her.

“Can we go now?” Val asks, turning toward the door. “Or do we need to explore whether or not I’m going to have children next, before we can leave?”

“No, let’s go. I’m sorry,” Maria says. And she is; she’s never pushed with Val like this before, not personally. She blames _Maloja Snake_ , which she seems to be doing frequently these days.

Later that afternoon, at the shore of the lake when Val asks to take the car that night to go see Berndt at Lake Como, Maria half thinks it’s out of spite, to punish her for earlier. Val stands there, in her bra and little white shorts at the water’s edge, and accuses Maria of being jealous of her time, her thoughts, her affection. The idea is ludicrous; Maria can’t help but laugh as she sheds her own clothes.

The cold of the water shocks them both, makes Maria’s skin tighten and her nipples harden. Val shrieks and splashes, and Maria laughs at her and at the exhilaration of the cold, and their noise races away from them across the stillness of the lake, bouncing off the mountains, taking on a life and destiny of its own.

\------

The next morning, for the first time since that other morning, Maria comes downstairs in the pre-dawn light and pauses in front of Valentine’s room. Telling herself she just wants to make sure Val returned safely, she pushes the door open softly, just a crack. 

(Maria could easily just look outside to see if the car is here; it’s an option she doesn’t address.)

Val is there, on top of the bed. Her hair is loose and tangled and curly down her back, glasses and water bottle and one shoe strewn haphazardly around her on the sheets as if she couldn’t even reach over to the nightstand. She’s sleeping with last night’s clothes only partially discarded, sweater off but tee-shirt on; she has shed her jeans but only halfway, and the tiny triangle mesh of her thong covers none of the creamy smoothness of her hips and lower back, the curve of her ass and thighs. Lying like this she looks pre-Raphaelite: like Collier’s _Circe_ , Leighton’s _Iphigenia_ or _Flaming June_.

Maria bites her lip and steps away.

\------

Act II of _Maloja Snake_ begins with Sigrid and Helena as lovers. Valentine and Maria waste an entire afternoon trying to rehearse the first scene, which opens on the characters in bed; maybe it’s the absurdity of saying the lines without actually being in bed together, and maybe it’s the absurdity of the lines themselves, but Maria can’t get through them without laughing, chortling as the heavy-handed language falls like a stone in between them.

“I’m sorry,” Maria says, giggling, and Valentine rolls her eyes for the tenth time and swats Maria with the playbook. “I just… I haven’t heard these lines since we did the movie, and they just read so differently now.” Maria wipes her eyes with her knuckle. “Did Wilhelm really think this is what two women would say, cuddling in bed together? Especially in—what did you say it said? _Post-orgasmic bliss_?”

“I repeat: so now the play’s bad?” Valentine mutters, but she’s smiling, cigarette hanging from her lips as she roots around on the table for her lighter. Smiling is better than the carefully-schooled, neutral expression Val usually takes on when they argue about this play, so Maria considers it a win. “If you aren’t going to take it seriously, of course it’s going to sound absurd.”

“Oh, come on,” Maria says, grabbing the playbook from off the table. “This part, when Helena says: _You’ve unlocked a new corner of my heart._ ” Maria rolls her eyes. “And this— _no-one else could make me feel this way_.” She sets the book down. “Tell me you’ve ever said that to anyone in bed, ever, and I will eat my hat.”

Val smirks and tilts her head in acknowledgement. “Fine, I grant you that that particular part is… a bit much.” Maria locates the lighter and clicks it for her; Val leans forward, inhaling so it catches. “But would you know any better than Wilhelm what two women say in bed together?” She breathes out the smoke, almost into Maria’s face but not quite, and there’s a challenge in her eyes.

“Would you?” Maria returns.

“You are answering a question with a question, _Sigrid_ ,” Val says, with a deliberate twist to her mouth. She inhales again, a harsh and deep pull. Maria sees her breath almost catch, sees her eyes water. “I’ll call your bluff. Sure I’d know.” She exhales without a cough and raises her eyebrows, and all of a sudden there’s a slinking, dangerous feeling that seems to be settling around them. “I repeat: would you?”

“I’ve had female lovers,” Maria says eventually, and immediately regrets her phrasing.

Val rolls her eyes. “That’s not what I meant,” she says, standing up and walking to the window.

“What did you mean, then?” Maria follows Val, comes up behind her until Val turns and they’re face to face.

“You know what I meant,” Val mutters, but she meets Maria’s eyes directly. “Twenty years ago, you got your break playing the beautiful seductress in a lesbian relationship, but after all of that, after all that fame and success and being so _desired_ , do you actually know what it’s like to love a woman?”

Maria doesn’t know how to answer, mostly because she doesn't think there is a right answer. “What, and you do?” she says instead, and regrets it immediately. 

“I do,” Val says evenly. She blows her smoke out the window, looking out at the mountains and not at Maria. Maria feels frozen, not knowing what’s going to happen when Val looks back. 

When she finally does, it’s with a crinkle in her eyes and a smirk. “And fine, you’re right. It’s _so_ over the top,” she says, giggling, and just like that they’re fine again. The spectres of Sigrid and Helena and their antagonism float away, dissipating into the Alpine air along with Val’s smoke and Wilhelm’s overwrought words.

\------

“You know,” Val says that evening in front of the fire, “I keep forgetting that Wilhelm wrote this twenty years ago. It feels different, reads different, when you remember that. Like, twenty years ago he wrote a play that’s almost entirely just dialogue between two women.” Val shakes her head. “That’s… sort of wild, when you think about it.”

“Twenty-three years ago,” Maria corrects softly, from the armchair. She has an after-dinner glass of Rosa’s homemade génépi in hand (Val had wrinkled her nose at the smell) and a blanket covering her lap, and the tension of the Act II scenes is finally starting to recede.

“Twenty-three,” Val repeats, thumbing through the play’s text. Maria doesn’t know why she insists on reading it even at night, even after they’ve finished the lines for the day. “What was the reception, when it first came out? What was it like?”

Maria hums. “Well, you know, I was eighteen for the first stage production and I didn’t have a lot of context. The reception was positive; it got good reviews, although I was still mostly unknown until well after the film, so I was a little distanced from it all.” Maria stares into the fire. " _Angels in America_ had premiered at about the same time, you know. I think Part II— _Perestroika_ —debuted in London in ‘93, at the National Theater, maybe the year before. The critics loved to draw parallels between the two, it and _Maloja Snake_.”

Val snorts. “What parallels?” When Maria doesn’t reply, Val turns her head to look over at her. “No, really, what parallels? I mean, come on, _Angels in America_ is… the Great Work. It’s about class and race, politics, life and death. Disease. Forgiveness. Love and truth, Ronald fucking Reagan and Mormons and… religion, and shit.” Val shakes her head.

“So?” Maria says, bristling despite herself. “And you think _Maloja Snake_ is less complex than that?”

“No. I mean… well, yes, in a way.” Val shrugs. “I’m just saying the scale is different. _Angels in America_ is… it speaks to the pain, the suffering not just of a person, or of two people, but of an entire generation. Pain that’s still felt today. It’s about… America. Literally, it’s in the title; the play is about America, and how you get fucked if you don’t… if you happen to be just tolerated in America rather than welcomed, or even worse, if you’re not tolerated at all.” Val pushes her glasses up onto the top of her head and rubs the bridge of her nose. “Plus it’s all, you know, cosmic and religious and spiritual, and there are literal angels floating around suspended on wires. I just mean in comparison, _Maloja Snake_ is a personal drama. It’s about two people, at the end of the day. It doesn’t try to be bigger than that, doesn’t make any statements about society. It doesn’t try to… take on so much.”

“And yet two minutes ago you said that what Wilhelm did was radical,” Maria argues. “To have a play so entirely devoted to and focused on two women, to have a play of sewn-together scenes of them talking to one another in different contexts and different rooms at different stages in their relationship? I think that’s rare even now, not to mention two decades ago. I think that says something about society.”

“Yes, no, you’re right, but that’s not what I mean,” Val says, sounding frustrated. “I’m not… I think _Maloja Snake_ is incredibly brave for what it did, I think it’s still insanely relevant today, playable, explorable. I think I believe that even more than you do, honestly. I guess I just mean it feels… smaller. Like, it’s about two lovers in Switzerland; they meet, they have an affair, it ends, and then at the end of the play one leaves and one takes an ambiguous hike.” Val shrugs. “I’m not saying there’s not… value, or meaning, or worth there. I think it’s beautiful, it’s my favorite type of play. I’m just saying that what it’s _not_ is… you know, social commentary about an entire country’s political system.”

“So it’s too provincial to be meaningful?” Maria asks. That word, _provincial_ , is a barb that’s coming down the line in Act III; Val winces, and Maria knows she’s made her point.

“Stop putting words in my mouth.” Val sounds irritated. “I didn’t say that, and you know it.”

“Well, maybe you’re right,” Maria allows. “It’s not something I really thought about very much at the time, but in retrospect, I suppose the comparisons between _Maloja Snake_ and _Angels in America_ were almost certainly…” She shrugs. “Superficial. Focused on the parallels of the main characters’ homosexuality, and probably not much else.” Val snorts at her word choice. “Hey. I know it’s not the popular term now, but it’s certainly what the papers would have written back then.”

“Back then,” Val mutters with a shake of her head.

“Yes, _back then_ ,” Maria repeats.

“Did you ever feel like…” Val starts to ask, but trails off.

“Like what?” Maria presses, after a beat of silence.

“Nothing,” Val says, and stands from the couch. “You want another?” she asks, already reaching for Maria’s empty glass. 

“Please,” Maria says. From the kitchen she hears Val clatter the ice and the hollow glug as she pours: more génépi for Maria, and more of whatever Val is drinking for herself. “Did I feel like what?” Maria repeats, when Val returns.

“Do you ever let anything go?” Val mutters to herself, settling back down into the couch. She stretches out, one knee up, arms above her head.

“No, I don’t. Say it: what were you going to ask me?”

Val wrinkles her nose. “I know you were friends with him and all, but do you think Wilhelm, like, got off on it? The play? Not literally, or god I hope not, but... “ Val rubs her face, clears her throat. “There’s a way to interpret the text as a perfect fantasy, for men I mean: the young beautiful seductive lolita and the older woman she leads astray.” Val glances at Maria. “You know? From a male perspective, what’s the motivation for telling that story, and in the nineties no less?”

“Sigrid is no lolita,” Maria scoffs.

“You’re impossible,” Val mutters, rubbing the back of her neck. “No, of course she’s not; she’s not Lolita, or Ophelia, she’s not Salome or Helen, she’s not Eve and she’s not whoever else you want to name. Of course not. Forget it.”

“To answer your question, I don’t know,” Maria says, ignoring Val. “I never really wondered, not when I was Sigrid. I was pretty young.”

Val eyes her. “You were eighteen. That’s plenty old to realize that men are fascinated by you,” she counters, voice bitter. “And you yourself admitted there was something, some attraction there with Wilhelm.”

“He was the creator,” Maria says, staring into the fire. “He created Sigrid, and in some way it felt like he had created her for me, even though I knew he hadn’t. Did it blur? Of course.” Maria sips her drink. “Did he, as you so elegantly put it, get off on it?” She shrugs. “Probably, at least on some level. Sigrid is a character as old as the Bible, older even, as old as the stories themselves. Why else do men keep writing about her, if not because they enjoy it?” 

“Well, but in this play, it’s Helena she seduces, and not John. Or Johann, I guess.”

Maria flicks her eyes over to Val. “Most men get off on that too, the idea of it.”

Val snorts. “Congratulations, you’ve arrived at my original question. So which was it, with Wilhelm? Did he truly care about their relationship, did he care that it was radical, or was the play just an exercise in… self-gratification? Self-indulgence?”

Maria watches the flames licking up over the logs of wood and the fireplace grate, throwing shadows all along the bricks of the chimney like so many long, dancing fingers. “I think he did care,” she says eventually. “I know I complain about the language, but he tried to…” Maria shrugs. “He tried to make it real, for them. There’s a lot in the play that isn’t gratifying or satisfying, I think, not to anyone except maybe the actors playing Sigrid and Helena. Sometimes not even then.”

“Those are the best parts,” Val says.

“Perhaps,” Maria allows. “Why do you ask?” she asks, after a beat of silence.

Val hums. “I’m sure you didn’t see it, but you know _La vie d’Adèle_ , the film that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year? _Blue is the Warmest Colour_ , in English. It’s about a relationship between two women, but when the film was released there was all this discussion about the male director and his quote-unquote ‘gaze,’ about the lens the film portrays the relationship through. About whether it’s actually real or if it’s just showing the audience—the male audience—what it wants to see. There’s tons of sex, and the sex was certainly from a… perspective.” Val clears her throat. “Anyway, I was just thinking about this play and how… god, it was written more than twenty years ago, you know? The world turns, society changes, time marches on, and yet the song remains the same. The questions we ask about women in art never really go away.”

“What did I just say?” Maria asks, mostly to herself. “Sex is the oldest story there is. It’s the first and ultimately the most important source of fascination.”

Val doesn’t reply. The fire cracks and snaps; the ice of Val’s drink clatters in Rosa’s practical tumblers. 

“Did you really describe Helena’s death as an ‘ambiguous hike’?” Maria asks, after a few more minutes of easy silence. She can’t keep the humor out of her voice. “ _Ambiguous hike_? Really?”

Val’s smile is wide open and smug. “Hey, it never outright says in the playbook that she dies. That’s just how everyone has staged it, so far.”

“She walks off into the Alps in the middle of winter and never comes back,” Maria says flatly.

“Even so. I’m sticking with ‘ambiguous hike,’” Val says into her glass, with another grin. Maria can tell it’s mostly to annoy her, but it’s so late and the words are so absurd that she just starts to laugh for real, and then she laughs and laughs more until Val starts laughing with her.

\------

Maria agrees to go and see Jo-Ann’s spaceship movie in St. Moritz mostly as a distraction from the disasters of Act II, which are myriad and include (a) Maria continuously missing a single line so often that Val threatens to tattoo it onto her hand, (b) two versions of a tense argument about Helena and Sigrid and humanity and cruelty that Maria thinks they’ve had four times already, and (c) Val spilling an entire cup of hot tea down her shirt when Maria startles her the first time they run the third scene. 

After the movie she and Valentine have too many beers and Maria bets too much money on roulette, and the night culminates in Val rear-ending someone’s car in the parking lot and then, at Maria’s explicit encouragement, driving away into the anonymous dark. In the sober face of morning she knows it’s a miracle they make it home at all, but they do, and Maria is still so floored by how much Valentine liked the _spaceship movie_ that she finds herself pushing, yet again, even when Valentine collapses on the couch in exhaustion.

To be brutally honest, the admission from Val, days prior, that Jo-Ann is her _favorite actress_ has stuck like a leech in Maria’s mind. Sure, Jo-Ann is young, and pretty, and expensive, and impulsive, and it’s all understandably attractive to people who aren’t already in bed with fame, who don’t know her vagaries and pretenses and falsehoods the way Maria knows them. But Maria, for whatever reason, expected—maybe hoped?—for more, from Valentine. After all, Val isn’t seduced by fame or celebrity: she has been admitted through those doors (on Maria’s arm, it’s true), has seen how the industry works, knows intimately that the privileges and drawbacks of attention come and go dependent on nothing more than the whim of a journalist, or a photographer, or a herd of pre-teen children. Fame doesn’t imply merit, doesn’t imply worthiness. It’s a plebeian measure of attention and remuneration, nothing more.

Instead of saying all that, though, Maria hears herself ask, like an insecure girl-child, “What do I have to do, to make you admire me?” And then, against her better judgement, she _keeps talking_. It’s definitely the beer. “I’m allowed to not be old, as long as I don’t want to be young? Is that it?”

Valentine mutters something that sounds like _yes, I guess, I don’t know, totally, well put_. And then she puts her hand on top of Maria’s, there on the back of the chair, runs her thumb along the top of Maria’s wrist; she lifts her hand and slides a knuckle down Maria’s cheek, a flare of _something_ in her eyes.

And then she’s up and across the room with a muttered _fuck_ like a scalded cat, fumbling with her lighter and putting as much distance between herself and Maria as she can without actually fleeing the room.

“I think… goodnight,” Val says, once she eventually lights the cigarette. She tosses the lighter back onto the coffee table instead of closing the distance between them, as if she’s afraid to take even one step in Maria’s direction. Her eyes are lidded: with exhaustion, with alcohol, with something else, Maria can’t say. She turns to go. 

But Maria doesn’t want to be left alone, doesn’t want to deal with the conflicting roil of her emotions, doesn’t want Val to leave. Wants Val to—come back. To look at her like that, once more. It’s a line, a boundary, and Val knows she crossed it and Maria knows it too, but right now Maria doesn’t give a fuck about the line. 

She wants to be admired.

Before she can think better of it she’s following Val to her room, deliberately invading the only personal space Val has to herself, and she asks about fucking _Berndt._ Why? Who can say. God, she is never drinking beer again.

“I’m exhausted.” Val deflects Maria’s question, posture defensive, cigarette held too close to the bedspread. 

Fine. Maria leaves, but halfway up the stairs, before Val shuts her door, Maria calls down to her, wanting to have the last word, wanting to push her point home.

“Jay doesn’t think he can get me out of the contract.”

It’s a lie, of course. Jay had said, not two nights earlier when Maria had called him while Val had been at Lake Como, that the agency would handle it, would get her out of the contract no matter the cost. Maria will have to call him tomorrow. 

“Yeah, I figured,” Val says, and out of the corner of her eye Maria sees her rubbing her head in her hands.

As Maria shuts her bedroom door, the night rushes back. The burn of Valentine’s hand on her cheek, the absurdity of Maria’s newfound hubris, her desire to _prove something_ to Val. Why else, if she’s honest, is she not backing out?

Beer, Maria decides, is for teenagers and old men, who can make stupid decisions and not have to live with the consequences. It’s her last thought before she collapses onto her bed.

\------

Maria, to her endless chagrin, has a beer hangover the next morning, and Val sleeps late. It’s nearly eleven before they meet in the kitchen, Valentine heading for the moka pot and Maria heading for the _pain au lait_ and Nutella. They meet in the middle, which is sort of inevitable considering how tiny the room is.

“Good morning,” Maria says.

“Morning,” Val says, bleary behind her glasses. “Could you pass me the—” she gestures, and Maria hands her the packet of coffee wordlessly. “Thanks.”

Val doesn’t bring up Berndt, and Maria doesn’t bring up Val’s touch last night, and neither of them brings up Jo-Ann or the movie. Maria also doesn’t broach the subject of rehearsing _Maloja Snake_ , and eventually Val, sounding much more like a human after an hour or so of caffeine and cigarettes, suggests they play Russian Bank (she refuses to use the French term). Maria roots out Rosa’s old bridge decks and they pass the afternoon with cards and tea and more cigarettes, letting a truce settle back down between them, tenuous but comfortable.

“I can see why this would be an ideal place to write plays,” Val says eventually, looking around them as Maria studies the board.

“Yes,” Maria agrees, flipping over the next card in her reserve pile. “It’s very peaceful, isn’t it? It reminds me of my family’s vacation home outside of Annecy.”

Val raises an eyebrow. “Your family has a vacation home outside of Annecy?”

“It was my uncle’s vacation home, really,” Maria says, shrugging. “My mother’s sister’s husband. I haven’t seen them in years, I suppose they still go. But we spent every summer there until I was, oh, I don’t know, fifteen or sixteen.”

“That sounds idyllic,” Val says.

“It was,” Maria says, turning over her final card. “Okay, I’m done, your turn. Actually I found it endlessly boring and stifling as a teenager, used to beg my mother to let me stay in Paris for the summers, which I found much more exciting, as you can imagine.” Val smiles. “But when I look back at it, I think those were some of the happiest months of my life, those summers there.”

“Was it too provincial for you?” Val asks, uncovering an ace and placing it in the middle between them. She taps her fingers on her lips, considering her next move.

“Oh, entirely, and all my cousins were younger, so I felt worldly and superior to them,” Maria says, waving her hands in the air. “No, by the time I was a teenager I wanted to spend my time chasing my boyfriends around the Métro and getting into my parents’ liquor cabinet. Not going on hikes and wearing scratchy socks and smelling like goats all the time. Plus,” Maria says, leaning across the table like she’s telling a secret, “I wanted to be an actress,” she says, with wide eyes.

Val grins back. “You know, I don’t think I knew that about you,” she says, moving a queen into one of the auxiliary spaces. 

“Oh yes,” Maria says. “And unless you’re trying to play Maria von Trapp, which I can assure you I was not, a cabin in the Alps is not the ideal place to ply your trade.”

“Sort of ironic, given that’s what you’re doing right now,” Val says evenly, startling a laugh out of Maria.

“You know, I hadn’t thought of that until just now, but you’re right,” she says, leaning back. “Are you finished yet?!”

“Not quite,” Val says, “give me a second to think, woman.”

“Pssh,” Maria says. High up ahead, an eagle calls down to them. “What about you? Did you have a family vacation home?”

Val snorts and flips over her final card. “Well, this doesn’t go anywhere; your turn,” she says. “And no, we weren’t fancy like that. I spent most of my summers as a kid camping with my parents, in California mostly. I also hated it, as a teenager.”

Maria raises an eyebrow. “Your father camped? Voluntarily?” Not that she knows Val’s father personally, but she does know he’s French, and the French don’t really _do_ camping.

Val shrugs. “Probably not at first, but my mom wore him down eventually,” she says. “You should see him, he can set up a camp stove and have coffee ready almost as quickly as my mom can set up the tent.”

“I can’t believe it,” Maria mutters. 

“Well, he always was very particular about certain parts of it,” Val says. “And at least when we were car camping, he would bring tons of wine—like, more than anyone would reasonably think my parents could drink.” Val shakes her head. “I'm pretty that’s why my parents stopped backpacking. You can’t bring wine.” Maria tilts her head in a question; it’s like Val is speaking a completely different language. “It’s too heavy,” Val says, slowly, like Maria’s a little dull. “To carry it. In the backpack.”

“Ah.” Maria uncovers the three of spades, places it in the center directly on top of the two in the same suit. “Have you heard from them recently? How are they?” She does not care about camping, in a car or otherwise.

“They’re fine,” Val says, leaning back and squinting up at the sun. “The usual. My mom’s really into beekeeping now, I think I told you. My dad is still teaching. My little sister is a hellion and they’re doing all they can to keep her from dropping out of college.”

“Parenting,” Maria says with a shudder.

“I know,” Val replies, with feeling. She pauses and looks at Maria, as if she’s considering her words carefully. “You never wanted it?” she asks eventually.

This, Maria thinks, is payback for the marriage discussion earlier. And maybe also for the whole Berndt thing.

“What, children? Perhaps at one point,” Maria says, shrugging. “It’s not painful for me, to be childless I mean, so you needn’t look so uneasy,” she adds, when Val glances away with uncertainty. “And let me tell you, now, with the divorce? All of the fighting and the lawyers and the dividing and the splitting? The whole time I just keep telling myself, this would be _so much worse_ if we also had children.”

“That is true,” Val says. “Look, I’m sorry, that was a personal question.”

Maria puffs air out of her cheeks. “I told you, it doesn’t bother me. And why is it any more personal than you asking if I had an affair with Wilhelm during _Maloja Snake_? Or if I’ve ever been in love with a woman?” She smiles at Val to take the edge off the words.

“Maybe because we haven’t had any wine today?” Val mutters, scratching her nose.

“An excellent point. And, you know, it’s quarter til four. Aperol spritz?” Maria asks, standing up from the table.

“You’re in the middle of your turn,” Val reminds her, raising an eyebrow.

“You’re no fun,” Maria mutters.

“Sit down, I’ll make them,” Val says, shaking her head and standing up to head inside. “We’re going to need to replenish Rosa’s liquor cart before we leave. Don’t cheat while I’m gone.”

“I won’t!” Maria calls after her, as she heads into the house.

\------

“If I promise to take it seriously, can we run the whole of Act II today?” Maria asks the next morning, not sure why she feels the need to be bargaining with Val when it’s her literal job to do this, run these lines (or whatever Maria wants) over and over.

“Eager to move on to Act III?” Val asks from the sink, with a weird half-smile.

“No. Brat,” Maria says, swatting her with a towel. Act III is the beginning of the end, the acceleration of Helena’s already precipitous decline. Nobody is eager for Act III.

Val ignores her. “Yes, let’s run it,” she says, placing the last of their breakfast dishes into the drainer above the sink. “But maybe, after the bedroom scene at least, could we…” She shrugs. “Walk, or something?” She taps her fingers against the counter. “I’m feeling antsy.”

“Good idea. Exercise will be good,” Maria says.

\------

An hour later Val is at the counter making sandwiches again. This time Maria is next to her, slicing the bread and laying out the cold cuts for Val’s assembly with the cheese and the bitter greens Rosa grows in the vegetable garden out back.

“I didn’t know it was possible to feel like this,” Val says, knife making precise slices through the firm cheese, not looking at Maria as she says it. It’s so out of context Maria doesn’t understand, at first.

“What?”

Val flicks her eyes over to her copy of _Maloja Snake_ on the breakfast table, ever-present like an unfriendly ghost that follows them from room to room.

Oh. The opening line of Act II.

Oh.

“I didn’t know it was possible to feel like this,” Val repeats, looking back to the cheese, not looking at Maria.

“Then you’ve never been in love before,” Maria murmurs. She sets the bread knife down, reaches for the tomatoes.

“I have, though,” Val says, looking up at Maria just quickly. “And it wasn’t like this.” She pauses. “This is… more. It’s new. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt.”

“You’re young,” Maria says, remembering how the words had made her glow as Sigrid, and feeling them like condescending ash in her mouth now. “When you’re young, it’s always new.” She laughs softly. “When you’re old like me, you’ll feel differently.”

“I don’t think so,” Val says, reaching out her pinky finger to brush against Maria’s wrist, where it’s holding the last tomato against the cutting board.

“Sigrid.” Maria hears a catch in her voice, and doesn’t know if it’s from herself or from Helena.

“Helena,” Val breathes, staring at the countertop between them. She’s completely off-book, Maria realizes, running the lines from memory and making sandwiches besides. “Does that mean you don’t… feel for me?” For the first time Maria feels Sigrid’s insecurity, instead of just her strength and confidence and manipulation in the face of Helena’s weakness. She feels it all woven together: the coil of conflict coming from Val, Helena’s distress, the choice between power and emotion.

Val reaches over and takes Maria’s bread slices, starts layering them with cheese and meat, tomato and greens, two perfect assemblies stacked there on the cutting board.

“No, of course I do, of course,” Maria says. “Sigrid, you…” she exhales, blows out a gusty breath. “You unlocked a new corner of my heart.”

Val’s smile is lightning-quick but Maria catches it, just there, before Val gestures for the cling film. Maria passes it to her.

“So you _haven’t_ felt this way before.” Val pauses to push her glasses up her nose. “Am I the only one?”

“Yes,” Maria says, whispers really, watching Val fold the sandwiches into their plastic. “My Sigrid, of course it’s you. The only one.” Maria bites her lip, reaches her hand out to grasp Valentine’s wrist. It’s not written into the stage direction, necessarily, but in Maria’s defense they’re supposed to be in bed, not making lunch in the dead playwright’s kitchen, so. “No-one else could make me feel this way.” 

Maria hates this scene, primarily for the stilted language, but also because it’s so one-sided, it’s so unequal. Helena doesn’t make Sigrid express her feelings, doesn’t turn the question back to Sigrid to ask if _she_ is in love, doesn’t make Sigrid articulate how _she_ feels. Helena allows herself to be misled, to assume and infer Sigrid’s feelings: it’s a mini version of the entire play contained in one act.

“Then I am satisfied,” Val murmurs. She turns to face Maria, one wrist still captured, sandwiches abandoned half-wrapped on the counter. “When will I see you again?” She reaches out her free hand and Maria stills, as if Valentine is going to embrace her, as if Val is going to run her hand along Maria’s arm or her thumb across Maria’s cheekbone or tuck a piece of hair behind her ear. But Val is just reaching for their backpacks.

The scene ends with Sigrid slipping from Helena’s bed under the cover of darkness. Maria and Valentine finish it standing there in the kitchen with morning light and birdsong floating around them, Val’s wrist encircled by Maria’s fingers the entire time.

“You have to go,” Maria says, and pushes tension into her final words, feeling Helena caught between fear of discovery and an unwillingness to have their moment to end. It’s the first and last time Helena tells Sigrid to go; from now on, for the rest of the play, she will beg her to stay.

“I don’t want to,” Val says. “You could hide me away in a cupboard, keep me here like a little doll, like your secret.” She’s staring down at their clasped hands, backpacks forgotten on the kitchen counter next to the sandwiches.

“You must,” Maria insists, “Lars is coming. Please, go. Sigrid.” Maria drops Valentine’s hand. “Go. This could ruin me. You could ruin me.”

Val finally, finally looks up at Maria, finally meets her eyes. The expression on her face pulls something out of Maria, something intangible but wrenching.

“I think I already have,” Val whispers.

\------

They run through the rest of Act II on their hike. Maria finds that Val is right, that she feels better for the exercise and the fresh air in her lungs, that it makes Helena’s words feel less stale in her mouth. 

The final scene has Helena attempting to re-establish control, requesting Sigrid’s presence, commanding that Sigrid knock when entering her office. But Sigrid, as she does for the whole play, has the upper hand: she puts Helena on the back foot, implies that everyone knows about their affair already, implies that Helena can’t keep herself away from Sigrid and that she’s been manipulated. She threatens to leave and makes Helena ask her to stay, and then turns the threat around to make it Helena’s choice. But it’s a false choice.

“If you want me to leave, just say so. Say it; it’s time.” Val clears her throat and waits a beat. “End of Act II.” 

She closes the play with finality and looks at Maria, squinting at her in the sunlight. “You hungry?” It’s a startlingly incongruous question, after the weight of the dialogue.

Maria looks over, out across the valley, rather than looking at Valentine. She can hear the goats off in the distance, but otherwise, the air is quiet, peaceful. “Yeah.”

The peace doesn't last, and it's her own fault. “ _You’ll be my lover_ ,” Maria quotes after they’ve finished eating, laughing to herself at the absurdity of the words as she settles down into the soft dry grass of the hill. “ _I'll keep driving everyone else away; I’ll have a tighter and tighter hold on you_.” She looks over at Val, willing her to see it. “Honestly, you don’t find this ridiculous?” The question flies out before she can help it. By now, Maria knows better—she and Val do not see eye to eye about this play, and they probably never will. It shouldn’t matter to Maria; everyone is entitled to their own interpretation, and god knows Maria’s had fights with other people about it before. Hell, she’d screamed at _Wilhelm_ about it at one point, even. She doesn’t know why it’s so important, here and now, to get Val to see it from her perspective.

“Why, because she speaks brutally?” Val asks, around a bite of apple.

“No! It’s phony, I don’t believe it.”

Val stands and walks over. “So you don’t think people can be blinded by their own emotions?” She crouches down, arms on her knees, still not really looking at Maria.

“No, I do, but not to that extent. It’s too theoretical, even a little stupid.”

Val crunches her apple again, frowning. “That’s theater. It’s an interpretation of life—it can be truer than life itself.” There’s a shrug in her words but also a conviction, an intensity that Maria didn’t really expect. “Sigrid puts Helena’s desires into words, she says the unspoken, she formulates it.”

“Cruelly.”

“Okay, cruelly,” Val allows.

“Yeah, cruelly, because she’s up to no good. You’re not in the character’s skin—I have no choice, I have to _be_ them, I have to identify with them. When it’s phony I _feel_ it, viscerally.” Maria sighs; Val doesn’t understand. “It can be literary, but still be true. I can feel the difference, I can hear it.” 

Val doesn’t speak. Maria can tell she’s holding her tongue.

Maria lies down, pillows her head on her jacket; the conversation is going nowhere, should probably never have started in the first place. The last thing she hears before she drifts off, sun warm on her face, is Val tossing her apple core away, flinging it out across the valley.

When they wake (when Val wakes her) it’s late afternoon, long shadows falling across the grass and air chilly, and Maria feels a slight panic. They’ve slept too long, the day is too far gone. They won’t make it back before dark.

She insists she knows a shortcut and Val goes along with it, even though they both know that between the two of them Val has the better (only) sense of direction. “I’m pretty sure Val Fex is… not this way,” Valentine says at one point, when it’s well and truly twilight and she and Maria are scrambling along what would only generously be called a goat path. 

Her relief when they find a road—any road—is profound. It’s the road to Maloja, which is indeed in the opposite direction from Val Fex (of course), but Val does not press the point.

Instead, there in the middle of the road, she stops.

“You know, you don’t have to keep me on if you find my ideas simplistic.”

Maria turns back, stares at her.

“What makes you say that?” A low knot of dread starts to form in her stomach at the expression on Val’s face. 

“If you find my point of view… uninteresting. I don’t really know what I’m doing here; I—I can run lines with you, but I don’t really see the point, you can find anyone to do that.”

“All I’m saying is that thinking about a text is different from living it. It’s nothing against you.”

Frustration seeps onto Val’s face and, when she speaks, into her voice. “You hate the play, you hate her… you don’t have to take it out on me. I’m just doing my job.”

“I’m sorry,” Maria says, whispers really, taking a step toward Val. She feels thrown, off-kilter, like the axes of the planet have tilted; she can’t see where this reaction is coming from. “I’m sorry,” she says again, “it’s this…” she clenches her jaw. “this _bastard_ of a play. It’s getting to me, it’s making me too combative. I don’t find your ideas simplistic. They make me feel _conflicted_ , but that’s not a bad thing. Val, I—” Maria hesitates, trails off. 

Val clears her throat into the quiet. “Every time I speak, you don’t listen to a word I say. You hear it, maybe, but you don’t listen. You said I’m not in the character’s skin, and that was unfair. If you think I’m not, like, fully—” Val rubs her eyes. “I _feel_ Sigrid. I’m not trying to, but I do. I feel her and I hate her sometimes but I also can’t help it, feeling what she feels, pushing back against it.” Val bites her lip. “But it also feels like _you’re_ still Sigrid and you’re… playing with me. Using me, like she uses Helena.”

Valentine stares at her, the line of her face illuminated only by moonlight. She’s so young, Maria reminds herself. She’s so young, and they’re living in each other’s pockets playing with something that’s bigger than them—that’s maybe _truer_ than them, even, thinking back to Val’s words. 

“You know, I… I keep a piece of every character I’ve ever played,” Maria says. “It sounds trite, I know, actor babble-speak, but it’s true. I carry them around with me, because in some ways they _are_ me, just different versions of myself.” She exhales. “I still have Sigrid, and I’ve been trying to make room for Helena too, but.” She shrugs helplessly. “It’s frustrating me. It’s not going smoothly, they don’t live well together inside me. And it’s unfair to you.” Val looks down. “I’m sorry,” Maria says again, not knowing what else to say. She knows there’s something she should be saying, something better than a four-word acknowledgement and a two-word apology, but she reaches for the words and doesn’t find them. (“ _You do your job well, I have no complaints_ ,” says Helena in Maria’s mind, before Maria can slam the play back behind her mental door.)

“Let’s just get home before the wolves eat us,” Val says eventually, walking forward again. She falls into step beside Maria as they head down to Maloja, but her eyes are fixed straight ahead; she doesn’t look at Maria.

\------

Act III is brutal, both because of the raw words of the text and because of the new energy and knowledge between Maria and Valentine. The office gossip mill titters and whispers and Helena’s colleagues trade meaningful glances behind her back; Helena discovers Sigrid’s plane tickets to Tokyo and throws them in her face, screams and wails her despair at the knowledge that she’s being left behind, that’s she’s being abandoned, forsaken. 

Sigrid is supposed to remain poised through Helena’s anguish and Val mostly manages it, but in the breaks between scenes Maria sees her anxious, sees her tapping her fingers against the table, sees her flick her eyes down to the playbook more frequently even though Maria knows she doesn’t need it anymore. Helena yells and rails and bargains and threatens and Val crosses her legs, curls her shoulders forward like she’s protecting the soft inner parts of herself. But Maria also sees the iron will of Sigrid in her, sees Val secure in the certainty of her power and her choice, of the possibility of departure. Sigrid always has the choice, after all; Helena never does.

And Maria—well. It gets to her, the words and the scene progression and Helena’s fear and despair. She always knew it would, but this stupid parallel between Val saying _I don’t really know what I’m doing here_ and Sigrid saying _The world moves, I want to feel that, I want to be a part of it; Switzerland is too provincial_ sits in her brain like a wild thing, gnawing and thrashing.

“You’ve become too dependent on me,” Sigrid-Val says at one point. “It’s unhealthy. What do I get in return?”

Maria hates it. She makes it a few more lines before she drops one. Again.

\------

Val brings up leaving exactly one more time, standing in the kitchen doorway as Maria is making coffee and trying to calm herself after a particularly violent Helena. It’s nearly their last day of rehearsing before they meet Jo-Ann at the Waldhaus, before Jo-Ann is scheduled to come up to the chalet to do the read-through and to take on the mantle of Sigrid from Valentine. Maria is simultaneously relieved and dreading the change, and the relief and the dread and the despair of Helena are all coming together in a snarl in her head. It seeps out of her when she argues with Valentine, as they have just done once again.

“You didn’t answer me.” Valentine’s words interrupt Maria’s thought spiral; Maria looks up, over her shoulder, and she knows immediately from Val’s face what this is about. “You have your interpretation of the play, I have mine. I think mine’s just… confusing you. It’s frustrating me.” Val shrugs. “It’s uncomfortable, it’s… ” She exhales. “Not good.”

Maria stares at Val. Again, she reaches for the right words, but it seems like these days the only eloquent words she can say were written twenty-five years ago by Wilhelm Melchior.

“Stay.” Even Maria herself can’t tell whether it’s a request, a plea, a command.

“N-no,” Val says, but she stumbles over the word.

“Please stay,” Maria says, heart in her throat, Helena’s tears still on her face. “I… I need you,” and it’s the truest thing she’s said all day, possibly the truest thing she’s said since they came up to Sils Maria. 

\------

The final scene of Act III begins in Helena’s office and ends with Sigrid’s final departure. After all the begging and screaming and sobbing of the earlier scenes, on paper the words read flat, almost anti-climactic, just a depleted coda to the doomed relationship that’s been unfolding in the previous acts. It’s mostly written to make Sigrid look good, to justify her actions, and to set the stage for Helena’s final decision in Act IV.

Maria and Valentine run it once.

“I came to say goodbye,” Val says. “You know today’s my last day; I’m heading out for drinks with the guys in Accounting in a few minutes.” Val clears her throat. “Sigrid comes up behind Helena and takes her hand; Helena turns to face her.”

“So you’re really going, then,” Maria says. “You’re really leaving me.” Her voice is flat and disbelieving; Helena is tightly controlled. For now.

“I am,” Val says. “Helena.” She hesitates, makes an aborted little gesture, and then reaches out to take Maria’s hand. “Helena, I’m moving on. You must as well.”

Maria closes her eyes in Helena’s defeat. “I can’t. Sigrid, I can’t live without you.”

“Look at me.”

Maria opens her eyes; Valentine takes a step forward, into Maria’s personal space. She squeezes Maria’s hand.

“You must be stronger than this. You can’t let a little fling ruin your life.” The words slip in between Maria’s ribs like a million knives. “I thought you were stronger.”

“Is that what this is to you?” Maria asks, voice creaky. “Truly? Just a little fling, just another job, something you’ll leave behind just like that?”

“Yes. I’m sorry you don’t see it that way.”

“So was it all a lie?” Maria asks, impetuous, catching Val’s other hand. “The way you… look at me, the things we said to one another? Was that all just… pretending?”

Val’s eyes are fixed on Maria’s face. “Of course not.” She pulls her hand free. “Sigrid cups Helena’s cheek,” Val narrates, and she brings her hand up to Maria’s jawline, thumb resting at the corner of Maria’s mouth. They’re close enough that Maria can feel the breath of Val’s words against her lips. “Just because I’m leaving doesn’t mean it wasn’t true. Let yourself believe it.” She hums. “It’s real. But it’s also…” she shrugs. “Not enough for me. I’m sorry.”

Maria lets the silence build before she speaks, lets Helena’s fear and desperation and wild, unreasonable hope grow in her heart. “Sigrid,” Maria says eventually. “Sigrid, please.”

“Sigrid kisses Helena goodbye,” Val narrates softly, murmurs it into the shared space between them. Maria breathes out; Val inhales, eyes roving all over Maria’s face, her expression open and uncertain and searching. 

“Maria—” Val says, a bitten off piece of a name: Maria’s name, not Helena’s. And then Val makes a helpless little sound and leans forward, presses her lips to Maria’s just softly, just briefly. It’s over before it’s begun but Maria feels stunned.

Val pulls back and bites her lip, gives Maria a tiny, rueful smile. “Sorry,” she whispers.

“Don’t be,” Maria whispers back. It’s not in the play, of course. She brings her free hand up to Val’s cheek so they’re mirror images, stares into Val’s face trying to understand.

They stand together for long moments, reflections sharing breath.

Eventually Val ducks her head, drops her hand; she steps back and goes to sit in the armchair, as Wilhelm’s text directs, and clears her throat.

“I typed up all my notes for the next girl, they’re in my desk,” she says. “Helena comes to stand in front of Sigrid,” and Maria does.

“There won’t be a next girl,” she says, firm but with the weight of despair in her voice.

“Don’t be naive. Of course there will be,” Val says, staring up at Maria from the chair. “There’s always another girl.”

“I can’t,” Maria whispers, and her cheeks are wet without even trying. “I won’t. Sigrid, I need you. I love you, I can’t live without you. I won’t.” Val doesn’t narrate the stage direction this time; Maria has already lowered herself in front of the chair, grasping Val’s knees. Val closes her eyes and brings her hand up to cover her mouth as Maria stares at her. “Sigrid, I beg you. Don’t leave me.”

When Val swallows, Maria hears the thick pull of her throat. “You’re not understanding. I am leaving you,” Val forces out eventually, opening her eyes. “Don’t you see? I’ve… I’ve already left.” Her voice is heavy and her eyes are bright; Sigrid should be agitated and impatient by now, but Val is turned inward, anguished. She reaches out to brush her fingers along Maria’s cheek, to grasp at Maria’s hands where they clutch at her knees. It’s not right, it’s not how the play should be, of course, but Maria knows it’s what’s true, at least here and now.

Maria sobs, just once, pulling her hands to her chest as Val stands up from the chair. Val looks down at her, and Maria sees only Valentine here, but Valentine as she’s never been before: face raw, pained with certainty and resolve. And regret.

Val takes off her glasses and wipes her face on her sleeve. “Goodbye, Helena,” she says, voice heavy, and turns to walk away.

It punches Maria in the gut, the wreck of Val’s voice and her words and the roiling emotion on her face; Maria lets it, feels herself exhale one more sob, one more push of Helena as she curls completely over herself, before she looks up at the retreating Val.

She tucks this feeling away, folds it up and secrets it down into her stomach, down among her organs, because she knows she’ll never play this scene with Jo-Ann without reliving this exact moment, without feeling this exact feeling that she feels right now, staring at Val’s back as she walks away from Maria.

At the living room threshold, Val turns to look back at her, face wet and hopeless.

Neither of them speaks for a long minute. “End of Act III,” Val says eventually. Her voice is unsteady; she sniffs, shrugs at Maria helplessly, and slides down to the floor, back against the door jamb, lowering her head down to her knees. 

Maria takes a moment to gather herself before approaching Val, and when she does she does it slowly, in case she’s not welcome. But Val doesn’t move away. Maria sits down, there on the ground next to her, leaning back against the wall so they’re shoulder to shoulder. After a moment, she reaches over to the coffee table for Val’s pack of Camels, lights one and offers it to Val, then lights another for herself. The ashy, harsh, bitter familiarity of smoke in her lungs eases her.

“Is it always like this?” Val asks after a few breaths, sounding calmer but rougher from the smoke. She’s trying to clean the smears off her glasses with the hem of her tee-shirt.

“No,” Maria says plainly. “No, it’s not.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Val says, wiping her nose with her sleeve again, scrubbing at her face and blinking.

Maria lowers her cheek to Val’s shoulder, and after a moment she feels Val tilt her head so it’s resting against the top of Maria’s. Val takes Maria’s hand where it’s lying on the ground between them, and they finish their cigarettes, and then two more, as the afternoon light turns to twilight, until they’re sitting in the dark with only the moon and clouds of smoke around them.

\------

“Do you need to run any of Act IV?” Val asks the next morning, pouring coffee. “We’re not meeting Jo-Ann at the Waldhaus until after dinner tonight, so we have time.”

“No, thank you,” Maria says. Act IV is mostly an epilogue; there’s an exposition scene of Helena preparing for her “ambiguous hike,” as Val had called it, pacing and frenetic in her despair, but no dialogue to run. The play ends centered on Sigrid, drinking champagne on an airplane and flirting with an older gentleman as Helena’s board members meet in a conference room to nominate the next Chief Executive.

It all wraps up in a nice little bow. There’s nothing challenging in Act IV.

“The weather is looking weird,” Val says, after they’ve finished their coffees and tartines. “The air pressure, the heat—it’s felt strange all morning.”

Maria has noticed it too. “Yes, it’s rare that it gets this hot here even at the height of summer. It must be 24, 25 outside already.”

“At least,” Val says, looking out the window. “And there’s no breeze, no clouds. In California we call it earthquake weather.”

Maria scoffs. “Surely there’s no such thing. Earthquakes have nothing to do with the weather.”

“No,” Val says, “but it’s this… feeling. Of something coming. There’s this, I don’t know, a quietness, a weight, like nature is holding still. And us, humans—we’re all just waiting for whatever it is that’s going to happen to happen. It makes people anxious.”

“Well, I’m going to take advantage and relax in the sun for a bit,” Maria says, feeling impatient. “I think we’ve earned it. You coming?”

“Sure,” Val says. 

Maria dozes and naps in the sunshine for what feels like the entire day; she drifts in and out of sleeping and waking and fractured dreams, unsettled by the content but soothed by the comfortable warmth of the sun on her skin. Val sleeps too at first, in the lounge chair next to Maria, but when Maria opens her eyes the second time, Val is lying on a towel spread out on the grass on her stomach, tanning, head pillowed on her arms and clothes piled next to her. She's naked except for those ridiculous white shorts she has.

Val’s tattoos are exclusively contained to her forearms; other than a stray mole here and there and a slight indentation from her bra strap on one shoulder, the expanse of her back is unmarked. Maria shifts in the lounge chair, caught in the liminal space between at rest and alert, still clinging to a hazy dream she can’t quite remember. 

“You awake?” Val murmurs, turning her head so she can look up at Maria from the ground. She’s not wearing her glasses. “I was thinking about another coffee, but,” Val yawns, “it seems like so much effort.”

“I had a dream about Helena and Sigrid, I think,” Maria says slowly, pieces of the dream coming back, blurry like a watercolor.

Val raises her eyebrows. “I’ve been having dreams about this damn play since we started running it,” she says. “Kind of impossible not to.”

“This was different,” Maria murmurs, rubbing at her face. “They were… here, in Sils Maria.” Val pushes herself up on her forearms; Maria catches the swing of a breast before Val turns to face her, squinting into the sunlight, one arm up to shade her eyes. “Helena looked just like Susan Rosenberg, but Sigrid was… I didn’t recognize her. She wasn’t me, she wasn’t Jo-Ann.” Maria looks down at her hands. “She wasn’t you. She was this… unknowable woman, I can’t even remember her face.”

Val looks wry. “That sounds like a pretty on-the-nose message from your subconscious,” she says.

“It worries me,” Maria says, leaning back and staring up at the sky so she doesn’t have to look at Valentine. “Helena, you know, she has this… forbidden desire, this lust for Sigrid that I still just don’t feel. Not when I think of Jo-Ann in the role. When I was Sigrid, of course, it didn’t matter.”

Maria hears Val shifting on the towel. “I mean…” Val says, sounding skeptical. “Isn’t that what you do as an actor? Figure out how to portray something you don’t necessarily feel yourself? That’s, like, the whole point.”

Maria looks back at Val, who’s now sitting upright. “Of course. When you’re working with other actors who are there with you, present and generous with you, of course. I meant that I worry that I won’t have that connection with Jo-Ann.”

“Because she’s young? Because of your preconceived notions of her?”

“Yes, and maybe that’s unfair,” Maria says.

“She might surprise you tonight,” Val says. Maria sighs dramatically. “Don’t get like that, it’s not cute.”

“I’m not jealous.”

“Mmmm,” is all Val says. She takes a breath. “What about me?”

“What about you?”

“I mean, when it’s me parroting Sigrid’s lines out to you, do you have trouble with it then? Is it a Jo-Ann specific thing, or is it an anyone-playing-Sigrid-who-isn’t-you thing?”

“It’s not a useful comparison,” Maria says. She knows exactly what Val’s asking.

“Why not?”

“Because with you I don’t need to fake it,” Maria says bluntly, turning to face Val.

Val’s eyebrows go up and her eyes snap to Maria’s, holding her gaze for long moments.

“Wow,” Val says eventually, blowing out a long breath. She shakes her head a little, rubs the back of her neck. “Okay then. I guess I wasn’t expecting you to actually acknowledge it.”

Maria sighs. “There’s no point in avoiding it.” Val stands and takes a step towards Maria, and then another; Maria’s eyes track her.

“Because I’ve crossed so many lines already?” Val murmurs, coming to stand at the foot of the chair, almost close enough that Maria could reach out and touch her but not quite.

“It’s not just you who’s crossed them,” Maria says, and allows her eyes to move down, to Val’s breasts and the pink-brown of her nipples, the smoothness of her abdomen. It rises and falls, in and out, with Val’s breathing.

“Jesus.” Val clears her throat. She starts moving again, comes around the side of the lounge chair until she’s standing directly between Maria and the sun. Maria squints up at her.

“I’m sorry if I’ve made you uncomfortable,” Maria says, because she can sense the conflict in the way Val moves, in the anxious flicks of her fingers.

“Trust me, that’s not what this is,” Val mutters. She reaches down to take Maria’s hand, turns it over and then back again, rubs her thumb against Maria’s knuckles; Val kisses Maria’s palm and then places it on her hipbone, right above the white cotton band of her shorts. Maria holds her breath. “Would it help?” Val asks, sounding curious but strained. “For Helena?”

Maria exhales. “Yes,” she acknowledges eventually. “Why do you think actors have so many affairs on set?” 

“I meant with me, specifically,” Val says. “Not Jo-Ann.”

“Of course, with you,” Maria says. “I don’t… care about Jo-Ann.” Keeping her eyes on Val’s face, Maria presses onto the hipbone, scratches over it gently with her fingernails. “She isn't Sigrid.”

Val’s resulting harsh breath is gratifying. “Jesus,” she whispers again, biting her lip. 

“You don’t have to,” Maria says, as Val moves in like a cat, settling herself on the chair so she’s kneeling over Maria, bracketing Maria’s thighs with her shins, bracing herself with her hands above Maria’s shoulders.

“I’m offering. I don’t offer to do things I don’t want to do.”

Maria searches Val’s face and finds no fear, or reticence, or hesitation, or unwillingness. She sees many things she can’t name but a few she can: anticipation, desire, curiosity. Val may be offering what she thinks Maria needs, but Maria isn’t blind; Val wants it, probably more than Maria needs it. “Well then,” Maria says, and looks up at Val in invitation.

Val’s eyes flick down to Maria’s mouth. “Helena,” she murmurs, like she’s trying out the name in her mouth for the first time.

Maria surrenders. “Sigrid.”

And then Valentine is kissing her, mouth soft and clever, more of her weight pressing Maria back into the lounge chair. The raw shred of lust that pulses through Maria surprises her, and she feels herself inhale into it, feels herself move her hands up to clench at Val’s hips, feels Valentine respond and shift above her. Val's skin is sun-warm and smooth and her hair falls forward, over her shoulders to brush Maria's face, her collarbone. Maria tangles her hands in it. It swims around her like a dream, like a cloud of half-surreal thought fragments: the unbelievable combination of Sils Maria and _Maloja Snake_ and an almost-naked Valentine in her lap, the bright summer afternoon and Valentine moving over her, Val’s hands trailing behind her head and along the curve of her jaw. 

“God, this is a mindfuck,” Val whispers when they break apart, breath harsh against Maria’s ear. Instead of responding Maria brushes one hand up Val’s side, up along her ribs as Val’s breath quickens, until Maria can circle and tease her nipple with the pad of her thumb, can trail her fingertips down along the underside of Val’s breast. Val gasps into Maria’s neck, rolls her hips when Maria uses her other hand to scratch down Val’s back, hard, just to the left of her spine. “Fuck, _Maria_ ,” Val bites out, quick and harsh. “Maria.” She moves one hand down to Maria’s collarbone, partially covered by the neckline of her shirt. “Can I? Touch you?”

Maria shakes her head. This, this is exactly what she wants: to know the feeling of Val moving and squirming above her, to luxuriate in the aura of Val’s desire, sweet and heady and delicate like elderflower. At one point in her life she would have said yes, but she knows better now; something in the back of her mind stops her. “After the play, if we both still want. For now, I need to— _oh_ ,” she breaks off, as Val’s teeth graze her neck, “I need to keep this feeling, for now.” 

“This feeling?” Val asks.

“Tension, lust.” Maria turns her face to run her teeth along Val’s ear in retaliation; Val groans, and Maria feels the vibrations of it rattle along her neck. “Denying myself.” She pauses. The next bit is true, too true, too exposed, but she can’t keep it back. “Denying you.”

“Does it make you creative, inspired? I always thought that was a cliche,” Val says, almost laughing.

“No. It’s just something I want to remember.” Maria circles her nails at the small of Val’s back, making her hiss. Maria hesitates a moment; everything is a blur, Valentine is Sigrid and not-Sigrid and her scene partner and her caretaker and her friend and her assistant and her guardian and now her lover, and Maria can’t tell which Val is the one here, now, the one who’s squirming impatiently in her lap.

But ultimately it doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day, Maria knows, deep in her bones, she won’t deny _this_. 

“But just because I am saying no,” Maria murmurs, moving her left hand through Val's hair along the soft bumps of her spine, “doesn’t mean you must.” She slides her other hand slowly around to Val's belly and then down, below her navel but no lower. “May I?” she asks.

Val pulls back to look at her, mouth bitten, eyes unreadable. “I…”

“It’s an offer, not a request,” Maria says, not moving, holding Val’s gaze to be sure.

Val stares at her, frozen except for where her chest is heaving. Maria sees the instant Val gives in, closing her eyes and nodding slowly, a sweet pull of capitulation. “Yes,” she says, and drops her head back down to Maria’s neck as if she can’t bear to look at her any longer. “Please.”

They don’t kiss again, and it’s not tender or sweet. The angle is a little awkward and Maria doesn’t try to be fancy, because to be honest it doesn’t seem like Valentine needs much fanciness anyway. The whole thing does not, objectively, take very long. Val’s guttural exhale when Maria finally slides her hand down to the heat of her is gratifying; satisfaction coils low in her stomach and spreads out underneath her skin at the sounds Val makes, at the tremors that twitch through her body, at Maria’s knowledge of Val here, like this, with her, _because_ of her. 

“Let me see you,” Maria says as Val breathes raggedly into her neck, as she takes Val’s other nipple in between her thumb and index finger and rolls it, just enough to make Val heave. “I’ve heard you, you know, in the mornings,” and _that_ earns her a groan, Val’s breath hot along her skin. “Just once or twice.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Val says. “God, Maria.” She shifts her hips, arches her back, and then somehow she’s _more_ open, somehow Maria’s hand has access to _more_ of her and she takes advantage, sets a rhythm with her fingers that makes Val jerk, makes he cry out over and over, sharp and wanting in Maria’s ear. 

“What did you think about? Those mornings?” Maria whispers, not letting up.

“ _God_ ,” Val bites. “Fuck, _yes_ —I thought about… the play.” She hisses in a breath. “I thought about you, you as Helena, and you as Sigrid. I would wake up dreaming about them.” Maria shifts the pressure of her fingers, curls them just slightly and Val swallows a groan, keeps it caught in her throat. “And me.”

“As Sigrid?”

“No,” Val says, choking on the word. 

“Just this.”

“Just this,” Val says, and it’s almost a sob, her breath hitching over and over. “Maria—I’m—”

Maria scrapes the nails of her other hand down Val’s back again, cruel, before she grips Val’s waist to hold her steady. “This will be what I think about,” she murmurs, matching the rhythm of her hand to the jerk of Val's hips. Val makes a strangled noise and clutches harder at Maria’s shoulders, body tensing and rolling against Maria’s hold. “What I desire in Act I, and what drives me in Act II, and what I lose in Act III,” and then Val is coming, hard, hips jerking and body shaking above and all around, cry echoing out across the valley. Maria draws it out, pulls it just a little farther, and fixes this moment in her mind: the mountain sunshine, the feelings of weightlessness and truth and release, the smell of dry grass mixed with sex and sweat.

Val collapses a little against her and Maria gentles her through it, lightens her touch, carefully teases out little after-shock whimpers and twitches and puffs of breath. Val keeps her face buried in Maria's neck for long beats and breathes, hot and loud and open-mouthed, until eventually she shifts her hips back, reaches down to take Maria’s hand, to pull it away.

“Enough, enough,” she murmurs, voice low and raw. “Enough.” She exhales, and it sounds shaky. “Oh my god.”

Maria doesn’t know what now, what would be welcome or unwelcome, but Val is still leaning forward into her, pressing and breathing hard, and so Maria settles for stroking her hands along Val’s back, playing with her hair and smoothing it down, soft and calm and tender. Val giggles into it and for five seconds it feels sweet, like they’re lovers, like this frothy, airy glow never needs to disappear. “God, you’re still, like, completely clothed,” Val murmurs, fingers plucking at the hem of Maria’s shirt. She sounds lighter, bubblier than Maria has ever heard her before. “Are you sure you don't want—I can't—?” 

Maria shakes her head. “Mmn. Thank you, but no.” Her voice comes out more unsteady than she'd like. 

She feels Val shrug against her. “If you're sure.”

“I'm sure,” is all Maria says.

Eventually Val sits up, pulls back, rubs her face. Maria sees her gather herself, sees her reach out and reclaim all the layers of Valentine that are floating around her and re-wrap them around herself, so that by the time she’s climbed out of Maria’s lap, she’s the Valentine Maria recognizes again.

“So I’m gonna go…” Val gestures to the chalet and coughs. “Clean up. Are you okay with raclette for dinner, before we go meet Jo-Ann? We need to eat that cheese before it goes off.”

“Yes,” Maria says.

“Okay,” Val nods, gathering her clothes and the towel. “I’ll… okay.”

Maria doesn’t watch her go. But when she brings her hand up to rub at her face, she can smell Val on her fingers.

\------

Val showers and stays in her room until dinner, and Maria tries not to dwell on it. It’s a relief when Val finally emerges and she’s her usual self, clattering plates and setting the table with her typical practicality, falling easily back into the strange domesticity that has grown between them in the chalet.

Even so. “Are you alright?” Maria can’t help but ask, partway through dinner. She wants to reach out and take Val’s wrist, touch her shoulder, but she doesn’t.

Val’s eyes jump to hers briefly and she pushes her glasses up her nose. “Yes, of course.” She clears her throat. “Thank you. Are you?” It sounds strangely formal, but not uncomfortable.

“Yes, of course,” Maria echos, but she can’t push aside the little flicker of worry in her mind. She has never been more frustrated with her inability to read Val (or rather, Val’s ability to make herself unreadable if she wants).

Across the dinner table, Val sees it; Val has no trouble reading Maria, never has, and it’s infuriating. She takes a breath, pours them each more wine. “Maria, seriously. I’m fine.” She gives her a weird little half smile. “I feel better, actually. Which is,” she clears her throat, “probably more than you can say.” There’s a new sensation between them now, another level of implication; Val’s expression is knowing, familiar.

“That’s a bold assumption,” is all Maria says.

Val shrugs. “Hey, it was your choice,” she says, and it sounds almost flippant. But then she meets Maria’s eyes. “And mine. Truly.”

“Okay,” Maria says. She should drop it, she knows; Val seems unbothered for now, but more pushing will probably not end well.

She can’t drop it.

“What was it like for you?” she asks, before she can think better of it.

Val sets her knife down on her plate, loud and harsh. “You can’t be serious,” she says flatly.

Maria shrugs. “I confess I’m curious. Obviously there was a lot more going on than just the physical aspect.”

“I don’t believe this,” Val says to the table, removing her glasses so she can rub at her eyes.

It's too far, and Maria knows it. She can't really believe she asked, not that she'd ever admit it to Val. “You Americans are so prudish. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” she says, deflecting.

“Oh, so you’re just making conversation?” Val says. 

“No. I thought…” Maria sighs. “I thought you might want to talk about it, and I’m the only option.”

Val leans back and stares at her from across the table, shrewd. “I do have a cellphone and friends, you know, even though service sucks up here. You mean _you_ need to talk about it.” 

Maria tilts her head and says nothing.

“Un-fucking-believable,” Val mutters. “Alright, I’ll tell you, but only if you answer my question in return.”

“So we’re bargaining now?”

Val smirks, and there it is again, the new knowledge in her eyes. “I think I have the upper hand, here.”

“Fine.”

“Fine,” Val repeats. She pushes her plate back, and after a moment, reaches for the pack of cigarettes next to Maria’s wine glass.

“Those are mine,” Maria says.

“I know, but I think this earns me one,” Val says, though they never keep track. She lights one, takes a breath. “And I’m going to need it. Um.” For the first time Maria sees a flicker of hesitation, maybe embarrassment. Americans, honestly. “Jesus, I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Val mutters, takes another drag, blows her smoke out. “It… well, you were there. It was fast. It wasn’t, you know, passionate, or romantic. But it was really,” Val licks her lips and ashes the cigarette, “intense. It usually—it usually takes me longer. But this was like, bam, immediate, and _super_ fucking intense.”

“The orgasm, you mean.”

“Oh my god,” Val says, again to the table. “Yes, obviously, that is what I am talking about.” She brings the cigarette back up to her lips, inhales the smoke and holds it in her lungs. “It was—a lot of it was in my head, cerebral, because of the play. Obviously Sigrid and Helena are lovers, and we aren’t—it wasn’t like that. But we had been running the scenes over and over, so all that antagonism and tension and lust was… going on, sort of, in the background.” She breathes out.

“I know what you mean,” Maria says. Val looks up at her, maybe in surprise, and Maria is startled by the heat she sees in the gaze. It’s searing.

“I think I… in addition to, like, the purely physical part of it I was getting off on the _idea_ of it, as it was happening. It was this feedback loop and it made the whole thing, uh.” Val rubs the back of her neck. “More, somehow. Stronger, more immediate. Intense, like I said. It hurt, a little, in a good way, you know how when sometimes…” she shivers, trails off. “Sometimes it’s forced out of you, rather than just a release.” Val shrugs.

Maria takes a breath and it’s shaky; she reaches for the cigarettes, leans over the table to retrieve them from Val.

Val notices. “Oh, I’m sorry, is this more than you bargained for?” she asks, teasing with but an edge to her voice.

“No,” Maria says, but it’s a lie and they both know it. She waits for her heart to calm down; Val smokes and doesn’t look at her, but after a few moments she shifts a little in her seat, crosses and uncrosses her legs, bites her lip again and looks at Maria with that same knowledge, acknowledgement, heat in her eyes. 

“I don’t know what else you want me to say,” Val says eventually. “I didn’t, like, imagine that I was Sigrid, or anything. The whole thing was about the play but not really about the play, you know? It just felt sort of inevitable, after everything else. And now,” Val waves the cigarette around, “it’s weird, my head feels clearer. The play was fucking with me a little, but I feel better.” She eyes Maria. “I don’t regret it. I enjoyed it, if that’s what you ultimately wanted to know. I’ll probably think about it again, you know, in the mornings…” she trails off, looking at Maria with a knowing smile.

“Very clever, you’ve made your point,” Maria mutters, and Val outright laughs at that. “I’m sorry I asked.”

“No you’re not,” Val says easily, finishing the cigarette and squashing it down into the ashtray. “I know you, you can’t help yourself.” She clears her throat. “My turn. What did you mean when you said that it’s what you’ll think about during the play? Is it really going to help you, with Helena?”

Maria sighs. “I told you it would.”

“I know what you said.” Val sips her wine. “Why? And I don’t buy the whole this-is-why-actors-have-affairs bullshit, by the way. You’re a good actor, you don’t need sex as a crutch.”

Maria shrugs. “It’s what I’ve been saying from the beginning. I feel vulnerable, with the divorce and the mess and the fighting and the hostility.” She looks down. “Helena scares me, her vulnerability with Sigrid scares me. The fear hasn’t gone away; in a lot of ways it’s gotten worse, since we started rehearsing. I wanted to remember what it felt like again—desire, sex, vulnerability.”

Val frowns at her. “Maria, I know we don’t talk about it, but if you think I haven’t seen the men scurrying from your hotel rooms in the mornings, you must think I’m really bad at my job. I am not even close to the first person you’ve been with since your ex-husband. Friends, strangers, former colleagues…” 

“This was different.” 

Val stills, and then tilts her head at Maria. “You mean, with me?”

“Yes,” Maria says, unwillingly. “I don’t know why. With you it was… pure. Just desire, and fulfillment. It felt different, I can’t explain it.”

Val raises her eyebrows and blinks at Maria.

“Huh. I… don’t really know what to say to that,” she says, eventually. “Like, you’ve slept with women before. Obviously.”

“Gender has nothing to do with it, don’t be so reductive.”

Val rolls her eyes. “It’s amazing how much you deliberately misunderstand me sometimes.” She leans back and crosses her arms, staring at Maria; Maria feels the strange urge to squirm, to turn away. “Alright, not gender. Vulnerability.” Val opens her mouth, and then sighs and holds out her hand. “Give me the cigarettes, goddammit, I can’t process this for you without.” Maria passes them wordlessly. “So, physical vulnerability,” Val says, lighting one, “obviously that was… me. In, like, every sense. I was naked, you were clothed, I came, you didn’t.” She winces and coughs. “Which, hypothetically of course, is maybe something you haven’t gotten from anyone else recently. No-one else has bared themselves like I did; they take it from you, they don’t give it. Am I right?” Val takes another pull and doesn’t wait for Maria’s answer. “But emotional vulnerability, on the other hand. Hypothetically speaking.” She looks at Maria as she exhales. “That’s why it was different.”

Maria says nothing.

“Ding ding,” Val murmurs, eventually. “Alright, I won’t make you say it. We’re done with this absurd, surreal conversation. I think we…” She clears her throat. “I think we both got what we needed. Now, can you pull it together to go meet Jo-Ann?”

\------

Maria pulls it together to meet Jo-Ann. So does Val. The energy between them retreats, re-forms into a version of what it has always been; the drive to the Waldhaus is comfortable, Maria playing with the radio and Val behind the wheel berating her for her old-fashioned music choices. Val seems a little star-struck upon meeting Jo-Ann (and then weirdly also the man she’s with, Chris whatever-his-name-is), but halfway into their cognacs (right about when Chris starts talking about the art film circuit) Maria sees her shift, sees her start to bristle a little at Chris and Jo-Ann’s incessant flattery, sees her barely refrain from rolling her eyes when Jo-Ann talks about the _vocation_ of acting. Maria loves it, both the flattery and Val’s reactions to it, basks in it even though she sees it for what it is.

“The concierge said the weather forecast for tomorrow means we might be able to see the snake,” Val says on the drive back to the chalet. “Might explain why it was so hot and still today. If we leave early in the morning we should be able to see it.”

They come home laughing and gossiping and making fun of one another. Val lights a cigarette and passes it nonchalantly to Maria like it’s nothing, teases Maria for not knowing who Jo-Ann’s (apparently married and famous) boyfriend is, eats an orange and barely prevents Maria from setting a pillow on fire with her cigarette. Maria feels lighter, more eased than she has in a long time.

"Thank you," Maria says, once it's well and truly late. She's stretched out on the couch and Val is in the armchair, staring at a map.

"For what?" Val says absently, looking up. Maria raises her eyebrows. "Oh," Val says, realizing. She bites her lip and looks down, but not before Maria can see a small, satisfied smile flit across her face. "You're welcome, I guess," Val says, pushing her glasses up on her nose. "It's not like it was a trial."

"Still. And not just today," Maria says. "I mean, everything. I know it's been... more demanding than usual." I know _I've_ been more demanding than usual, she doesn't say.

Val nods at her from across the room, and Maria thinks maybe she understands all the same.

"We should go to bed if we're going to get up at dawn," Val says eventually, putting the map aside and standing. She stretches her arms above her head and Maria watches, sees her shirt ride up just enough to show a tiny sliver of smooth, pale skin.

Maria remembers how that skin felt under her fingertips, under her nails.

Val sees her watching and raises her eyebrows, but after a beat she just shakes her head, fond. "Goodnight, Maria," she says. On her way out of the room she pauses to brush her hand against Maria's shoulder, part caress and part benediction.

Maria falls asleep on the couch despite her best efforts. She feels more peaceful, more secure than she has since she called Klaus to tell him she’d do the play, all those months ago.

The next morning the snake floats down from the Maloja Pass into the valley, and Val leaves her. Maria doesn’t see it coming.

\------

_Epilogue_

Valentine sees _Maloja Snake_ in London exactly twice: once on opening night and once on closing night, mostly because she likes the poeticness of bookending, of closure.

“Oh please,” says Nigel, when she tells him this the evening before closing night. “That’s not why. You have something unfinished.” He stares at her over his pint, tie loose, eyebrows expressive. “You could have been going any night a week, if you just wanted to see the play and get closure.”

Valentine shrugs. They’re in a pub in Bayswater and it’s crowded enough that her silence almost feels like an answer; the warm chatter and comfortable glow slides into the space in their conversation. She sips her beer.

Nigel is undeterred. “Valentine,” he says, deliberately mis-pronouncing her name so that it sounds like the holiday, “I’ve let you avoid it thus far, but no further.” He raps on the bar table between them. “Out with it,” he says, the wrinkle on his forehead severe. “Why did you stop working for Maria? What happened?”

Val hasn’t told him anything, hasn’t told anyone anything, really. The transition has been awkward. Maria’s future ex-husband’s lawyers still have Val’s personal number and won’t stop calling, even though Val has given them Claire’s number a hundred times; she and Claire have developed a weird relationship over text message, with Val forwarding information from lawyers and publicists and studio executives that should have been sent to Claire in the first place, and Claire occasionally texting back to ask where the keys to Maria’s Paris flat are, or which car service she prefers in London, or what to do when Maria’s tailor won’t get back to her. 

Val always replies, because she can’t help herself. She sees Claire in the background of paparazzi photos, but refuses to Google her.

“Hey,” Nigel says. “Look, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but it sort of feels like…” he raises an eyebrow. “Maybe you need to?”

Val sighs, stares at the fake woodgrain of the overly-lacquered table. She knows she does. And Nigel—who has seen her through nearly every disaster of her life, who has held her hair back over a toilet and cried with her watching _The Hours_ and bullied her into going dancing and yelled with her about celebrity drama—is probably the only person she will tell the story to.

“I ran Sigrid’s lines with her,” Val says eventually. “With Maria. And we argued about the play, about what it meant, about Helena. Maria didn’t want to let go of Sigrid, and things got weird. I felt like I was her… mother, her friend, her enemy, the subconscious part of herself she hated, all at once.” Val shrugs. “On the surface of it it’s not that uncommon, you know. For people who are as famous as Maria is, relationships are a different challenge than they are for you and me. So, you hire someone to be your PA but you also sort of hire them to be your friend, to hang out with you, to talk to you.” 

“This sounds like way more than that,” Nigel says.

“Believe me, I know.” Val shakes her head.

“Okay,” Nigel says, drawing the word out when Val doesn’t speak further. “And so…?”

“And… I don’t know. Everything blurred together.” Val rubs the back of her neck. “We were up there in Sils, pretty isolated, living in Wilhelm fucking Melchior’s house for god’s sake, running this play over and over, me as Sigrid, her as Helena. It fucked with my head, and hers too I think.”

Nigel leans back and stares at her evenly. “So when you say everything blurred together…” 

Val meets his eyes and just raises her eyebrows. Nigel is a culture critic for the _London Review_ ; he knows the plot of _Maloja Snake_.

“Shit,” Nigel breathes. “Oh, that’s fucked up.” He looks at Val and waves his hands. “I’m not judging, far be it from me, I just meant, you know, in the context of the play…” He shakes his head. “Goddamn.”

“I know,” Val says. “I know, I know.” She rubs her face with her hands. “Weirdly the sex was the least fucked up part of it? After everything else it just felt inevitable.” She says this part to the table, not looking at Nigel.

“That is so meta,” Nigel says, almost to himself. Val kicks him. “God, sorry.” He clears his throat. “Wow. Um. Are you… okay?”

Val sighs, itching for the cigarette that she can’t have indoors. “Yeah. Time has helped. You know, perspective. I sometimes regret leaving, but I think that if I had stayed it would have just deteriorated even further. I knew I had to leave for days before I actually did.”

“Why did you stay so long? The sex?”

Val snorts. “No, the opposite. I stayed because I wanted to get her through the whole play, if I could. I left the morning Jo-Ann was coming up to the chalet to start rehearsing.” She glances at Nigel. “We didn’t sleep together until the day before. And once we did, I knew she’d be okay.”

“Was it that bad?” Nigel asks, but it sounds kind rather than flippant.

“You’re an asshole,” Val says, swatting his arm. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. No, it was…” Val shrugs. “It was good. Weird, cathartic. It made it really clear that I needed to leave, but also that I _could_ leave.”

“That’s good, then.” 

Val bites her lip and stares at the table. It _is_ good; she knows it’s good. And yet. 

And yet she can still feel the stinging burn of Maria's nails down her back, months after the scratches healed, can still feel the shock and throb of the orgasm she hadn't expected and wasn't ready for, the slam of it and the roaring in her ears afterwards but also the clarity, the feeling of something being lifted, the sensation of weightlessness, airy and light like a cloud. She still thinks about the unyielding press of Maria's attention and the push-pull between them, the way the words of the play twisted and re-formed themselves around their interactions, their own personal bullshit, their own individual demons and wants. Val still wakes with Sigrid's words in her head, wakes with hot desire aching and pushing under her skin, gets off on just the _idea_ of it and what it _meant_ and yes, fine, also the memory of it, the memory of giving, of possessing, and the way Maria had looked at her afterwards: in satisfaction, in wonderment, in appreciation, face bare and open and defenseless.

“So what is going on with you, then?” Nigel asks. “You’ve been in London the entire time she has; why?”

“I don’t know,” Val whispers eventually. The answer hides from her like a cat around a corner, one she knows is there even if she can’t look directly at it.

The next night, against her better judgement, Val’s feet carry her to the theater: out the door, down the stairs to the Tube entrance, up the escalator, out into the glittering sparkle of London’s West End. She stands in line, hands over her ticket, lets them poke around in her bag, slides into the anonymous dark of the theater with her playbill up like a shield. She still doesn't know why she's here.

And then Maria Enders steps out onto the stage, spine straight and shoulders back, and Val knows. 


End file.
